What is Schizophrenia?

Oxford Languages Dictionary:

Schizophrenia is a serious mental condition of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

Individuals with schizophrenia may often struggle with interpersonal skills due to misperception of social-emotional cues, deficient social cognition, and impairments in Theory of Mind: the ability to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them.

Schizophrenia also impairs one's affect: the conveyance and interpretation of one's and others' emotions. People with schizophrenia may struggle to properly understand others, sustain coherence of thought and speech, and adequately relate to others in the personal, professional, and social domains.

Schizophrenia is also distinguished by visual, auditory, or other hallucinations, such as misperceptions or misreadings about people, events, or situations. For example, one can be sitting in a cafe and hear a group of people laugh at another table. A person with schizophrenia might interpret such laughter as being directed at him, reading significance into cues or phenomena that are not objectively there.

In the gnostic tradition, Schizophrenia is a sickness of the mental body. The mental body possesses its functionalism and senses, such as a series of nodes or aura points which receive and send thought. When the silver shield of the mental body is weak, impaired, or damaged, then psychological impressions which enter or originate within the mind become overstimulating or difficult to interpret, understand, or control.

The mental body allows for the transmission, reception, and emanation of thoughts in the internal worlds. Even physically, thoughts are an energy that travel and convey meaning between individuals. In people with schizophrenia, the mental body is sick and operating sub-optimally, whereby the thoughts, energies, or meanings of people's psychological content become an overwhelming barrage. Imagine that a flood breaks through a weak dam. The same with mental impressions for a person with schizophrenia experiencing psychosis or residual symptoms.

Oftentimes, the words and ideas of others are not translated properly, due to paranoid egos, mental / psychic impression overload, and strain upon the mental body. By working with the mantras S M HON, sacred rites for rejuvenation, and pranayama / alchemy, the mental body can be healed so that its range of apprehension is more acute, empowered, and serene, able to take in more impressions without shutting down or becoming triggered.